Category: Indian Cinema

Piku is one of the best releases this year in the UK. I laughed, fell in love, reflected on the faded grandeur of Calcutta and admired the writing, direction and central performances. The music by Anupam Roy wasn’t bad either.

The eponymous character is an attractive young woman (played by Deepika Padukone), a singleton of around 30 working in Delhi as a partner in an architectural design company. Her busy life is complicated by the demands placed on her by her 70 year-old widowed father, a hypochondriac constantly complaining about his constipation. When he demands a trip to Kolkota to visit the house he still owns (and where his brother still lives) Piku discovers that her reputation as an angry passenger has alienated all the taxi drivers in a local company. Father decides they must be driven to Kolkota (1500 miles away), so the taxi company boss (who has his own reasons for leaving Delhi) has to take the job himself. Since father is played by Amitabh Bachchan and the taxi boss by Irrfan Khan we are guaranteed an entertaining ride.

Irrfan Khan and Amitabh Bachchan discuss diet and bowel movements.

At this point I should point you to Omar Ahmed’s posting on the film. I’m indebted to Omar for several insights into how the film works. I’ll try not to repeat things he says and offer instead some extra points. I first came across the director-writer partnership of Shoojit Sircar and Juhi Chaturvedi when I watched and very much enjoyed Vicky Donor (India 2012). That film dealt with the social issue of sperm donation and the idea of ‘designer families’ and the impact on the sperm donor. It too employed comedy and featured a Bengali family brought to Delhi (Sircar is a Bengali). The effectiveness of that film derived from the acute observation of people in potentially embarrassing situations in which they are allowed to react naturally. This is a form of social comedy approached with genuine humanism and in Piku Sircar and Chaturvedi utilise the family melodrama and the road movie in constructing their comedy narrative. In doing so they create a narrative about a ‘real’ (upper) middle-class Indian family. ‘Real’ in contrast to the ways most families are depicted in mainstream Hindi cinema.

The film could be universal except for the one aspect of Indian middle-class culture that remains beyond my understanding. There is a fourth character in the car – a servant who acts as something like the old man’s ‘batman’. He rarely speaks and is largely ignored by the other three characters, except when he is needed. The careful attention to detail in the script is illustrated by a scene in which at the beginning of the car journey the servant climbs into the front passenger seat next to the driver. The driver refuses to move and apart from a few glances in the rear view mirror, nothing is said until Piku changes places with the servant. Rana, Irrfan Khan’s character is an educated man, a civil engineer who worked in Saudi Arabia before taking over the family business. He needs to assert his social status – important to him as he must grapple with Amitabh’s Bengali patriarch Bhaskor Banerjee. Later we learn that Rana has a Bengali family name (Chowdhury) even if he comes from Uttar Pradesh. This makes him at once potentially acceptable, but also inferior to Bhaskor. These nuances, as Omar suggests on his blog, point us towards the kinds of narratives explored by Satyajit Ray. Piku is a familiar Ray woman – introduced in the opening sequence by a full length poster of Ray. Later she dismisses a potential suitor because he does not appreciate Ray’s films.

Piku has been a big hit in India – and in South Asian diaspora communities overseas. The reviews still reveal a significant portion of detractors – many perhaps angry that there seems so little in the way of ‘plot’ and excitement with three major stars. The music is all used to support the narrative without disrupting it – there are no romance set pieces or choreographed dances etc. Only a bicycle ride through traditional Calcutta (reminding me of Ray’s Mahanagar at times) breaks away from norm. The pleasures in the film come from the script and the performances. In the UK a specialised film distributor was able to make a considerable killing with the ‘Indian Independent’ film The Lunchbox (India 2013) starring Irrfan Khan. Piku has been a success for Yash Raj in the UK (two Top 15 appearances in its first two weeks) but it won’t have been seen by the same audiences that enjoyed The Lunchbox. How to put these two audiences together is an intriguing question – but I wonder if either the Indian or UK distributors really want to try?

It’s somehow indicative of the lack of interest shown by Indian distributors towards audiences outside India and its diasporas that there are no subtitles on the trailers for most new releases (even though the films themselves are subtitled). This trailer over-emphasises the romance elements and the relationship between Piku and Rana is developed in understated and subtle ways.

Like this:

Roy advised me that OK Kanmani was screening at Cineworld in Bradford: I assume he will post on the film. I went along last Thursday: the film was fine but the presentation left something to be desired. My last post was regarding the failings of the distribution sector, added to by Roy; but the multiplex chains have their own failings

This is the most recent film directed by Mani Ratnam; I think he is the most interesting and skilful filmmaker working in the mainstream film industries in India. OK Kanmani [Madras Talkies 2015, the title is a song at a wedding celebration late in the film] is essentially a Romcom and it is limited by many of the conventions of this genre. Adhi and Tara, Tamil-speakers working in Mumbai, meet and start a romance. He is a designer of games, hoping to hit the big time: she is an architectural student, but she comes from a wealthy family. The ups and downs of young love are embroidered by issues like dementia in a family member and attitudes to non-marital partnerships [live-in]. This adds depth and emotion to the film but there is an absence of the strong social issues that are common in Ratnam’s films.

Technically and stylistically this is a tour de force. Ratnam and his production team produce some of the most visually and aurally interesting productions in contemporary Indian cinemas. The film, in colour and 2.39:1, looks and sounds great. And both sound and vision have slightly unconventional tropes which add interest. The film makes intelligent use of current mobile and tablet technology: there are games sequences, stemming from Adhi’s work: and some beautifully composed sequences of architectural sites visited by Tara. The music is rhythmic with strong beats, but also uses unconventional sounds and instrumentations. One reservation I have is that one aspect of this was undeveloped. Tara and Adhi’s aunt are both skilled in Tamil music, but only once [for plot purposes] do we enjoy their performance.

This is not my favourite Ratnam film, but it is always interesting and a pleasure to watch. But I need to add a few warning notes on my experience. When I got to Cineworld there was no queue at their combined ticket/food counter. But in the previous week when I arrived for a Hindi film there were five people in line: the two front members literally spent at least five minutes going through the Cineworld menu before I was able to persuade a staff member to open up another till.

Thursday though I was quickly in, but I had to walk down two corridors to reach screen 14. When the trailers came on they were for Hindi films, but without subtitles. I trailed back to the ticket person at the entrance. She went off to tell the manager. By the time \I returned to the auditorium the current trailer now had subtitles in English. The opening credits for OK Kanmani came on: they looked interesting but whilst the DCP was in the 2.39:1 the screen was cropped by two curtains to 1.85:1. At this point the staff member arrived to tell me that the manager had stated that the film did not have English subtitles. Given the distributor was a USA company this seemed odd – so we watched and as Adhi shouted his first line of dialogue the subtitle appeared. So I pointed out to the staff member the problem with the curtains. She went off to tell the manager saying it might take a few minutes.

The curtains were gauze so I could see something of the image in the covered parts of the screen. After a while the first song started, during a wedding ceremony. Since nothing had happened I went out and saw another audience member. He said he was going out and would tell the staff that the curtains had not yet been adjusted. I continued watching. When we reached the third song and 35 minute into the film the curtains still shrouded parts of the image. So I again trailed round to the entrance and the same staff member. She told me that the manager had just gone up to sort out the problem. Sure enough when I returned to the auditorium the curtains were slowly moving to reveal the whole widescreen image.

Then to add insult to injury when the intermission arrived I had to listen to a medley from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!

Paulo Cherchi Usai, along with other writers, has predicted the ’death of cinema’. If this comes to pass I would like see prosecutions of the commercial film companies for the manslaughter or even second degree murder of film.

Titli is another important film in the gradual emergence of an ‘Independent Indian Cinema’. It represented the new strain of Indian cinema at Cannes this year and is still waiting for a release in India after festival screenings around the world. I was excited to see the film at the Leeds Festival – but disappointed in my quick scan of the audience around me by the absence of the local South Asian audience. We struggle to see Indian independents in UK cinemas and often they appear fleetingly in arthouse rather than multiplex cinemas. Titli is a debut (fiction feature) directorial outing for Kanu Behl, a graduate of the Satyajit Ray Film Institute in Kolkata. He himself is Punjabi and in the 1990s he grew up in Delhi with his parents – both actors, writers and directors. In 2007 he began an association with film festival workshops and Titli has been developed as part of a NFDC (National Film Development Corporation) Screenwriters’ Laboratory. Behl worked with Dibakar Banerjee on Oye Lucky!, Lucky Oye! in 2008 and Banerjee is the producer on Titli, making the film the first part of a partnership between his own production company and the mainstream production house Yash Raj Films – best known for Bollywood spectaculars. Banerjee is one of the leading figures in ‘Independent Hindi Cinema’ and took his place alongside Anurag Kashyap as a director on the compendium film project Bombay Talkies.

‘Titli’ means ‘Butterfly’ in Hindi and as a name for the lead character in the film, the youngest of three brothers, it is one of the reasons why he is teased and treated as naive. But Titli has plans to escape his all male family in a Delhi colony. While his elderly father (played by the director’s father) stays in the background, his two older brothers run a racket based on violent car-jackings in conjunction with a corrupt local police chief. Played by newcomer Shashank Arora, Titli is physically weaker, but, we suspect, a little brighter, than his brothers. The eldest brother Vikram, played by Ranvir Shorey (a comic actor in the other performances I’ve seen) is a terrifying brute here with the actor having piled on extra flab. Titli wants to escape and the rest of the family want enough capital to start a legitimate ‘cover’ business. But when the latest car-jacking goes wrong, losing everyone’s cash, Titli is chosen to be the means of recovery – by marrying him off to a young woman who could also be used in the family ‘business’. But the chosen bride (a suspiciously pretty young woman from a seemingly more established family) has plans of her own and she and Titli share a desire to escape. That’s enough spoilers. The script is well thought through and with good performances all round and lively camerawork, Titli is very successful. I’ve seen festival reviews which refer to violence ‘off-screen’ but I found that what was ‘on-screen’ was quite violent enough. I think that the preferred term for characters like Vikram is ‘a goon’ and he uses a hammer as a weapon of choice. This kind of violence is mainstream in India so I clench my teeth and sometimes close my eyes.

Titli on his scooter with his wife Neelu (Shivani Raghuvanshi)

I want to recommend Omar’s review of the film on his new blog at Movie Mahal. He suggests that Titli marries the crime film and the traditional Hindi family melodrama – but of course here removes the mother figure. The new wife comes into an entirely masculine home (which production designers made even more claustrophobic by altering the rooms in the ‘on location’ dwelling). The second woman who exerts some external control over the family is Vikram’s divorced wife who demands her dues and causes further financial pressure. As well as this mixing of genres, Omar also notes the possible mixing of filming styles with elements of neo-realism feeding into the action sequences. I’ve seen references to improvised dialogue for many scenes and also the suggestion that the film was shot on 16mm to achieve a grittier feel. Neo-realism does move a narrative forward on the basis of simple but devastating problems associated with lack of money but what is important in Titli is perhaps that Titli the character is something of a fantasist/dreamer and that he has to recognise that he needs to become more realistic in his ambitions. His fantasies are based on the latest scam to involve India’s urban growth – the control of parking franchises in the new tower blocks seemingly rising everywhere in Delhi.

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